Reductionism and failure in understanding why social web products fail or succeed
Most of modern science is based on a reductionist framework and it’s no surprise that we, the students of this body of science, resort to reductionism in trying to explain almost anything. Reductionism can be defined as
Reductionism can either mean (a) an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or (b) a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents.
Then, it’s no surprise that when first confronted with the question of ‘Why was product X successful or a failure’, we naturally put our reductionist hat on and and try to reduce the product to its basic parts (usually features or marketing strategy) and assign values to them in their contribution to the success or failure of the product.
This approach works very well for products that are more or less independent of other products’ or peoples’ actions. For example, we can apply this model easily to find out why a Dyson vacuum cleaner dominated the market at a particular time period. Or, why the Motorola RAZR exploded in the the cellphone market back in 2003.
Equipped with this great framework of analysis, we naturally use it to answer the same question about networked web products. Hence questions like ‘What feature(s) of Facebook helped it beat MySpace?‘, ‘Did MySpace lose because of the Google Ad deal?‘, or ‘Which feature of Zoosk makes it so much better than Match.com?’.
The problem with applying Reductionist framework to understanding social web products is that we can not capture complex interactions between different users of the same product in any simplistic way. And that’s where we usually turn to emergence theory. As wikipedia puts it
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems.
What we need to remember is that not all phenomenons can be explained using a reductionist framework. This is specially true for networked web products which social products are a great example of. So, maybe next time we want to analyze the rise or fall of the next social web product, we should not go straight for breaking it down into individual features. It might save us from drawing simplistic conclusions that can lead to bad decisions.
Shayan,
This is a VERY interesting topic and you make a very good point about the problem with reductionism. However, I feel equally unsatisfied with the “emergence” approach, because the answer it provides is either circular (“Complex systems are complex”) or unfalsifiable (“Each system has a unique character, somewhat of a SOUL or its own CONSCIOUSNESS, that cannot be replicated through other means”).
Alternatively, I think whenever reductionism doesn’t yield a satisfactory response, we may want to re-examine the formulation and framing of the question. For instance, perhaps reframing “What features of Zoosk make it so great?” to “Why would female Facebook users aged 20-29 prefer creating a Zoosk profile over a Match.com profile” yield a better reductionist answer?
Touraj
April 10, 2011 at 9:58 pm
I agree Tourag. Re-framing can help is getting closer to causal relationships in a complex system. One thing that I would caution against is the illusion of causality though. There are times that the best we can do is arrive at correlation and it’s very hard to tell the two apart in these situations.
Another approach is to really forget about finding that “silver bullet” and take the whole system you are studying, glean some best practices (not necessarily causalities), and try to apply them to your parallel/next system.
Shayan
April 10, 2011 at 10:12 pm